Abstract: One of the most striking developments in global change research is the growing importance of "vulnerability" as a scientific organizing concept, where vulnerability is a function of the exposure, sensitivity, and resilience of human and natural systems to social and environmental change. With attention to vulnerability have come novel ways of representing and incorporating humans and nature in environmental assessment, new analytical methodologies, and the recognition and integration of varied ways of knowing. This research draws on experiences from an Arctic vulnerability project in illuminating some of the challenges and opportunities that vulnerability assessment presents for a sustainability transition. The presentation compares conceptual frameworks for vulnerability and impact analysis and highlights the advantages of a holistic, multi-scalar vulnerability approach. This comparison provides a basis for exploring value judgments involved in defining vulnerability, changing roles for indigenous knowledge and indigenous knowledge holders in vulnerability studies, and new perspectives on participatory research and capacity building.Bio of Marybeth Long Martello:Marybeth Long Martello is a Sustainability Systems Research Post-Doctoral Fellow. In 2000-2001 she was a Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) Project Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her research examines intersections of science and environmental politics for issues such as desertification, whaling, and climate change. Marybeth is co-editor, with Professor Sheila Jasanoff, of a GEA volume on local knowledge and environment-development politics. The case study she is authoring for this book concerns controversies over the right of the Makah tribe in Washington State to practice whaling. Marybeth is also a contributing author to the GEA edited volume on designing environmental assessments. The chapter she is co-authoring, with Dr. Alastair Iles, examines how different ways of framing climate change impacts shape and are shaped by methodologies and participation in assessment processes. Marybeth''s paper, "A Paradox of Virtue?: ''Other'' Knowledges and Environment-Development Politics" will be published in the August 2001 issue of Global Environmental Politics. This article analyzes "traditional knowledge" as an increasingly important concept in environment-development policymaking and explores unsettled questions regarding varied meanings of traditional knowledge, who speaks for it, and methods for its systemization.
